John Lewis & PartnersCopied

The John Lewis Partnership has been employee-owned since John Spedan Lewis put the business in trust in the late 1920s: all 85,000 staff are partners with a say in the business and a share of profits. Yet in 2018 neither John Lewis nor Waitrose said so on the sign. The new identity, the first major change in 18 years, arrived in a hard year for the high street, days after Debenhams' own rebrand and with the Partnership warning that half-year profits would be close to zero. Harry Pearce said the project had started three years earlier, so it was not a reaction to the slump.

Pearce set three aims: put the employee ownership up front, create what he called a bloodline between the three brands, and build a system flexible enough for fashion, electricals, a deli counter and a can of beans. The names became John Lewis & Partners and Waitrose & Partners, a purely typographic identity in widely spaced Gill Sans that can break over different numbers of lines, bold on a lorry or quiet on a scarf label.

The graphic device is a set of lines drawn from a 1960s diamond pattern by Peter Hatch, from the Hans Schleger era, and rooted in the company's haberdashery past; a hand-drawn headline alphabet built from an old Gill incorporates them. Colour was split deliberately. John Lewis went monochrome, because a green logo did not fit everything it sells. Waitrose got a richer range of five greens. And Partner Green, after the green ink Spedan Lewis signed documents in, was reserved as a small highlight, on staff name badges for example, a tiny gem for the partners only.

Design Week readers were lukewarm: one found it clear and crisp but lacking panache, others groaned at Gill Sans and eighties letter-spacing.

The criticism of the typeface misses the point. Gill Sans was already John Lewis, and the work's real achievement is structural: it makes ownership the brand, and puts the founder's green in the hands of the staff rather than on the shopfront. That is a rare example of an identity decision carrying genuine meaning.